Documents are exchanged in various types of workflow, such as adjusting schedules, processing expense requests, processing attendance reports and/or the like.
In addition, information processing devices of recent years such as cell phones and personal computers are provided with functions for sending and receiving textual information that is digitized documents, and these functions for sending and receiving textual information are often used in workflow.
There are various methods for these functions of sending and receiving textual information, including not just functions for sending and receiving documents using the Internet but also functions for sending and receiving files using a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) approach without going through a server.
Thus, textual information is communicated through a variety of methods in various types of workflow.
However, in much workflow conducted from communicating textual information, understanding and processing the textual information received or sent is left to the individual user, creating a variety of problems.
For example, when a document file inquiring about participation in a meeting is received, it is necessary to read and comprehend the received document, compare the comprehended content to a schedule that has already been created, and reply affirmatively or negatively about participating.
In addition, for example when an email requesting expenses is received, the responsible party must comprehend the contents of the expenditure from the email and process such.
In this manner, in workflow accomplished via textual information there have also been cases in which time was wasted in understanding the textual information and creating and updating rules manually, and human-caused mistakes arose.
Hence, in Patent Literature 1, an information processing device is disclosed that includes a means for managing email, a means for managing a schedule, a means for analyzing email, a means for determining whether or not email analysis results are reflected in the schedule, and a means for reflecting the contents of email in the schedule in accordance with the determination results.
This information processing device can create a schedule automatically by analyzing email contents.
In addition, when a scheduling conflict arises, it is possible to correct the schedule by selecting one of the conflicting schedules.